Parameter Limited Terrain Export?

[PabloMack]

oh, one way you might look into creating a single mesh out of your per frame files is to fuse the points in LW (I'm sure there must be some kind of tool for that)

This isn't very effective because the actual geometry created for each frame is different. This is why terrain pulsates in animations. TG2 starts fresh on each frame and each geometry that is created is an approximation to allow only that needed according to the distance from the camera. As the camera gets closer, more detail is needed for a given part of the geometry so that more polys are rendered.  This means that the vertices are highly unlikely to correspond to those of the previous frame. If you tried to merge all of the objects you would get an awful mess of polys superimposed in the same space but not corresponding exactly. You think that loading one of these objects into LW is slow; try 250 of them for a 250 frame animation.

But your idea of generating one geometry that is used for rendering all frames in a camera path series is exactly what TG2 needs to do. This should completely eliminate the terrain pulsation that has been plaguing my TG2 work. If TG2 also created one set of light sampling points that are good for the whole camera path series, light pulsation could also be eliminated. All of the "flicker" problems could be eliminated and Planetside would be way ahead of Vue in terms of animation smoothness. Alas, more computing power and memory would be needed but the results would be spectacular.  And I would not have had to spend days of tedious manual labor "fixing" flicker by hand. What a pain.

BTW- After fusing points don't forget to merge polys. They require separate operations.

[goldfarb]

oh, one way you might look into creating a single mesh out of your per frame files is to fuse the points in LW (I'm sure there must be some kind of tool for that)

BTW- After fusing points don't forget to merge polys. They require separate operations.

not in Houdini 

animated geometry import and the ability to export terrains are two big features that will really help Terragen break into VFX work...I can't wait

[PabloMack]

oh, one way you might look into creating a single mesh out of your per frame files is to fuse the points in LW (I'm sure there must be some kind of tool for that)

Fusing points in LW is done with the Merge 'm' command. Eliminating redundant polys is then done with Detail/More/Unify Polys.

After thinking about this some more, though, having an object produced with every frame in the LWO micro exporter may be the only way to get all of the animations done in TG2 out into another package (without having to redo them in that other package). However, it might be so much labor for anyone to use all of these per-frame-objects that this method may rarely ever get used in animation work. I am going to look into it further.

[Tangled-Universe]

Yes this is a real pain
I know that improved LWO export is on the "to do"  list, but I have no idea of course when this will be available.

If your terrain doesn't have big overhangs then the best option for now is to create an LWO from heightfield and export that.
No overhangs etc. then, but something suitable for camera animation for example...

Or generate a heightfield from your terrain, save as .ter and convert to .bmp which you can in turn use as displacement map to reproduce the terrain in your app of choice.
See my workflow here:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/content/view/61/99/

[PabloMack]

I just discovered that LightWave CAN use objects that are replaced on each frame.  See link below:

http://www.newtek.com/forums/showthread.php?t=115989

This makes me very

[goldfarb]

oh, sorry...I didn't mean to imply that one would want to use per-frame terrains, I was referring to the obj objects etc...
one way to get terrains with overhangs into LW (or whatever) would be to use the LW exporter from a series of cameras placed to get as much of the terrain as possible - then fuse them, then hunt down any little areas that have low detail etc, and fix them with the standard poly tools...

[PabloMack]

Yes this is a real pain

I'm glad we see eye-to-eye on some things.

If your terrain doesn't have big overhangs then the best option for now is to create an LWO from heightfield and export that.

Or generate a heightfield from your terrain, save as .ter and convert to .bmp which you can in turn use as displacement map to reproduce the terrain in your app of choice.
See my workflow here:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/content/view/61/99/

For now I am avoiding heightfields altogether because I am working on designing whole planets using methods that apply to whole planets. I have glanced at some of your work for creating more local views. I am very impressed by your "Cloud Peak animation". I look forward to reading and going through it when priorities allow.